Video: Playing back audio

Playing back audio seems like a no- brainer function in Pro Tools. Press the Play button in the Transport controls and you're good to go. (Music playing.) Well, there are some additional playback options to consider that can be very helpful, and that's what I'll be discussing here in this video. Aside from pressing the Play button in the Transport window, you can also use the Spacebar. (Music playing.) Or, you can press Play on a control surface like the 003. But wait, there is more.

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Playing back audio

Playing back audio seems like a no- brainer function in Pro Tools. Press thePlay button in the Transport controls and you're good to go. (Music playing.)Well, there are some additional playback options to consider that can be veryhelpful, and that's what I'll be discussing here in this video. Aside frompressing the Play button in the Transport window, you can also use the Spacebar. (Music playing.)Or, you can press Play on a control surface like the 003. But wait, there is more.

If you go to the Setup > Preferences and down here in the Operations page, we have the numeric keypad. We can use the numeric keypad for playbackand stopping as well.So if we have the Transport checked off here that means you can press zero onthe numeric keypad and you get playback. If we have the Use Separate Play andStop Keys checked off, then you have to press Enter on the numeric keypad.

With Transport selected, you can also press Stop using the zero on the numeric keypad.There are other ways to stop as well. Pressing the Spacebar, or pressing Stopon the control surface. Each time I've been playing so far in this video,we've been starting from the very beginning of the session. But if we want to go tosomewhere else in the session, we can do it in a number of different ways. Use the Selector tool and click anywhere and then press Play. (Music playing.)Or, you can grab the Timeline Selection Start Marker. So now we have the startand the end markers and this creates a selection of where we can play. (Music playing.)You can also use the Fast Forward and Rewind buttons in the Transport controls. (Music playing.)Now, I was just clicking-and-holding on those, but you can also individuallyclick and you'll see here, they're bouncing from measure to measure. (Music playing.)We can also click into the Counters and set the time that we want. So if wewant to start at measure 9, press 9, and then Return or Enter and you'll seethe cursor move to bar 9. (Music playing.)We can also use the Selector tool to click-and-drag to create a specific areafor playback. So, if I click-and-drag, I can select this one bar for playback. (Music playing.)We can also use the Time Grabber tool to select a region. (Music playing.)Now let's talk about Edit Window Scrolling. If I go to the Options menu andlook at Edit Window Scrolling, there are three options: No Scrolling, AfterPlayback and Page. First, I'll choose No Scrolling. I'll go back to theSelector tool and if I put the Selector down here and press Play, it's goingto play beyond what we see on the page. However, Pro Tools is not going to react.

(Music playing.)That's No Scrolling. If I change it to After Playback, something different isgoing to happen when we stop it. (Music playing.)The cursor is now placed in the middle of the Edit window and this is where wehad originally started playing back. So, I'll go back to the beginning here andthen go back to where we started before, and let's change the scrolling againto Page view. Press Play and see what happens. (Music playing.)You'll see that it's scrolled to the next page, our playback was here and assoon as it hit the edge of the page, it scrolled to the beginning and placedthe cursor at the beginning of the next page. Now Pro Tools HD and Pro Tools LEwith complete production toolkit or the DV toolkit have some additionalscrolling options, but I won't cover those here.

Let's move on and talk about the playback modes. If you go up to the Playbutton and right-click it, you'll see that we have four different options.Half-Speed playback is a really cool option. You can use it to learn how toplay really fast passages of music. For instance, if you load up a reallyripping guitar solo that has a lot of notes and you can't figure out what they are, you can use Half-Speed playback to play it back slower and learn what the notes are.Now note that audio is actually played back an octave lower with Half-Speedplayback, but MIDI is not. (Music playing.)Notice how the bass is an octave lower, but the MIDI stuff stays right in thesame octave. Now you can also activate half-speed playback if you Shift-clickthe Play button or press Shift and hit the Spacebar. Another option is Primefor Playback. When you've got a large number of tracks in a session, Pro Toolsmight take a little longer to start playback than usual and we can avoid thisby using Prime for Playback mode.

If we right-click and choose it here, it will show us that it's primed forplayback. It will have the Stop button lit up and the Play button will flash. (Music playing.)So, if you hit the Play button or press the Spacebar, like I did, it will startplayback right away. Now we don't really see a difference too much in thissession because it's kind of a small session, but if you had a lot of tracksand it was causing Pro Tools to react a little slowly, this would be a great option for you.

You can also Option-click the Play button on a Mac or Alt-click the Play buttonon a Windows machine to enact Prime for Playback. Let's move onto LoopPlayback. If we right-click the Play button again, we can choose it here. That will show you the Loop Playback icon. There are a number of other ways that youcan activate Loop Playback. If you go to the Options menu, it's right there. We also have a key command, Command+Shift+L on a Mac or Ctrl+Shift+L on a Windows machine.

You can also Ctrl-click on a Mac or Start-click on a Windows machine. So let's hear how this works. Solo the bass track and I'm going to actuallydouble-click with the Selector tool to highlight this region. Now I'm going to hit Play.(Music playing.)It cycles through that loop. The final play option that we have in Pro Tools iscalled the Dynamic Transport. We can choose that by right-clicking the Play button, turning that on and you'll notice that the main time scale here, whichhappens to be Bars and Beats, expands to double its size. And that means thatwe can actually grab this Play Start Marker and move that separately fromwhat's selected as the playback area. And we don't lose this selection.

So what's cool about this is I can start playing back near the end of this loopand see how it sounds, cycling back to the front of it, like this. (Music playing.)See, it starts here at the Play Start Marker and then loops around. So we cansee if the loop transition works well. (Music playing.)Which it does, in this case.Now note that enabling the Dynamic Transport mode automatically activates LoopPlayback mode if it wasn't already active. It deactivates the Link Timeline andEdit Selection and that's this button right up here. We'll talk more aboutthat in another video. There is one more button in this area that I want tocover regarding playback and that's called Insertion Follows Playback.

First, I'm going to get rid of the Dynamic Transport and Loop Playback to showyou this. Right-click, right-click again to get rid of both of those and thenwe're going to reactivate the Link Timeline and Edit Selection and thenactivate the Insertion Follows Playback. So when I drop my cursor into playback now, you're going to see something different. (Music playing.)When I stop it, it stops and keeps the cursor where I stopped it as opposed toreturning it to where I first started playing. So check it out again. (Music playing.)The cursor ends up here instead of back here. If I turn this off again-- (Music playing.)--the cursor returns to where I started it originally.

So as you've seen in this video, there are many more options for playback inPro Tools than it may seem. You'll probably be utilizing most of these optionsin your normal workflow, the more familiar you get with Pro Tools.

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